Forum Curhat

What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean? Web Analytics in Higher Education
Kyle James, Wofford College

Are you listening to what your website visitors tell you?
How are you making web decisions? If you're not using analytics, you are wasting your time.

What is the purpose of our website?? Recruitment
#1 most important audience is prospective students

Intuition is good, but you need the data

Key Performance Indicators - 4 areas

• Sources (campaigns and traffic)
• Success (conversions)
• Users (segmentation)
• Content (sites, groups, pages)

What is important? For uDU - schedule a visit, apply

Benchmarking - look once a month or so
(traffic comparisons, demographics)

Alexa, compete, quountcast
edurank.nucloud.com
Website grader
Google analytics (need to check this comparison capability out in G analytics)

Nothing is exact - enables you to make educated decisions

10/90 rule - spend 10% of budget on tool and 90% on people who use the tool. (use the free solution like Google. We need to get way better at using it)

sitescan or wasp will tell you if analytics is on your page - and working

What do you do with this data overload?

Filters - like an all lowercase filter, www and no wwww - cleans up your analytic data

Destination url tagging - set up for print, email, facebook campaigns, etc.
more info: doteduguru.com/stamats/urlbuilder

tracking links - you can also track pdfs, etc with some extra code.
more info: doteduguru.com/stamats/tagging

helps you make decisions over time about where to make changes